Recent Changes

2020-01-27

• 22:17 UTC (new) (history) 2020-01-27 Splitting a past commit in two, and a bonus regex trick . . . . Marcin Borkowski – More than a year ago I described a very simple Git rebase workflow, where all we were interested in was just fixing some mistakes in a past commit. Let us now go a little bit deeper. One thing I had always trouble with was splitting a commit in two (or more). While there are many tutorials about this on the internet, I wrote my own, even though it turned out that it is not better than the other ones. Go figure. (One advantage is that I have it on my website, so that I won’t need to do much searching in case I need it.)

2020-01-19

• 17:51 UTC (new) (history) 2020-01-19 tldr . . . . Marcin Borkowski – For today, I only have a short tip. Some time ago, I discovered this little gem called tldr. This project aims at creating an example-based alternative to man pages. It comprises several hundred short pages containing a short, one-line introduction to the command explained and a bunch of examples.

2020-01-13

• 20:03 UTC (new) (history) 2020-01-13 Automatic testing during rebasing . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I am already accustomed to hidden gems in Git. Still, finding one is always nice. Recently, I was reading through git-rebase manpage, and two things drew my attention.

2020-01-06

• 09:08 UTC (new) (history) 2020-01-06 Org agenda statistics, part I . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I wrote about the org-batch-agenda macro. I decided to finally put it in good use. My goal is to write a command-line tool (or alternatively, an Emacs command) displaying some statistics about my pending tasks. However, for that I needed to solve two (minor) problems.

2019-12-24

• 14:14 UTC (new) (history) 2019-12-24 Christmas 2019 . . . . Marcin Borkowski – So, it’s Christmas Eve again! Thanks be to God for His mercy and coming to us as the Child! This year, I have special reasons to be thankful, since my family got through a difficult time of serious illness of one of us. I am sure every one of my readers has something to thank for – don’t hesitate to kneel before God the Almighty, his Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and thank! As usual, my Christmas present to all my readers is a decade of Rosary for you.

2019-12-23

• 15:01 UTC (new) (history) 2019-12-23 Counting sentences in emails . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I wrote about sentence counting in Emacs buffers (or regions). I promised a sequel, and here it is. The real reason to count sentences is that I wanted to be able to automatically put a signature in my email referring to one of the http://sentenc.es/ webpages. It turns out, however, that counting sentences in email messages is much more difficult than it seems.

2019-12-16

• 21:56 UTC (new) (history) 2019-12-16 rot13 and other Caesar ciphers in Emacs . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A few days ago I saw a friend’s message on the Internet. The message looked like a bunch of random characters. Of course, I suspected a simple substitution cipher. What do I do?

2019-12-07

• 10:06 UTC (new) (history) 2019-12-07 Dollar-quoted strings in Bash . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As we all know, bash is a terrible but ubiquitous thing. Nowadays I usually avoid writing bash scripts as much as I can – but sometimes I really need to do something bash-y, for instance in the command line. One thing I encountered some time ago is putting newlines into bash strings, e.g. in parameters. My use case was that I wanted to make a Git commit from command line with a multiline commit message.

2019-12-01

• 22:00 UTC (new) (history) 2019-12-01 A simple trick with selecting rows created today . . . . Marcin Borkowski – For today, I only have a short but useful (at least for me) trick. When I test some new feature involving saving something to the database (PostgreSQL in my case), I often want to see what was actually written into the database. For that purpose, the best query is a short one.
• 21:58 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2019-11-04 Starting Emacs with custom configuration directory . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Wow, thanks! I'll definitely look into this!

2019-11-25

• 20:41 UTC (new) (history) 2019-11-25 Using inotifywait to generate files on the fly . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Sometimes I want to edit some file which is then transformed to some kind of “target” format, suitable for watching. It might be a LaTeX file, a Markdown file converted to HTML, or a HTML file converted to PDF (as it was the case for me some time ago).

2019-11-20

• 17:56 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2019-11-11 Diffing buffer fragments . . . . Mat tPrice – Interestingly, at least on my system, if `select-enable-primary` is set to t, this command will fail when used as described because `kill-ring-save` . . .

2019-11-17

• 10:28 UTC (new) (history) 2019-11-17 Diffing buffer fragments, continued . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Apparently, my last blog post about diffing buffer fragments sparked a small discussion on Twitter. Most comments fell into one of two categories: some people wanted to use ediff (which I explicitly mentioned I didn’t want), and some people complained about the temp files (which do not bother me that much). Well, it turns out that I really did not have to create the temp files after all!

2019-11-11

• 18:49 UTC (new) (history) 2019-11-11 Diffing buffer fragments . . . . Marcin Borkowski – While working on a certain project, I needed to check the differences between two text fragments. We all know and love diff, but it operates on files, and what I had was two fragments of two files (or sometimes even of one file) which I wanted to compare. There are a few solutions to this problem, but they seemed too complicated for me.

2019-11-04

• 20:12 UTC (new) (history) 2019-11-04 Starting Emacs with custom configuration directory . . . . Marcin Borkowski – The usual thing people are told to do when debugging/isolating Emacs problems is to say emacs -Q, that is, start Emacs without reading in any configuration. Sometimes, however, this may not be a good idea. When there is some problem with packages, however, we may actually want to load some things, like a minimal set of packages if we suspect they do not work together. Of course, what we don’t want is changing our configuration.

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